Many years ago, I conducted an experiment of placing a note in copies of several briskly selling books in a local Washington bookstore. The notes had my phone number and offered $5 to anyone who saw them and called me up. No one called. Though hardly scientific, this tended to confirm my suspicion that people like buying books more than they like reading them. And of course, in the famous formulation (credited to Gloria Steinem, among others), writers don't like writing—they like having written. They like having written under the impression that this means they will be read. The whole book thing is thus based on mutual misunderstanding.
—Michael Kinsley (1951-) in Slate, 21 November 2002
